Career Goals Made Easy
Setting career goals is linked directly to better performance and subsequently, better pay and better rewards.
Do you have a clear plan for your career goals? In other words, do you have a good idea of where you want to be 5, 10, 25 years from now?
The fact is, when we set clear career goals for ourselves we achieve at a much higher level, refuse to waste our time on tasks that do not contribute directly to succeeding with our career goals, and most importantly, earn more recoginition, both financially and from our peers and superiors.
In this quick guide I am going to show you how you can use the power of goal setting to get control of your career goals, and also at the end I will talk a little about a goal setting tool that you can use to set, plan and virtually place your career goals in auto-pilot in less than 20 minutes.
But first, here are some general tips to help you before you start writing out your career goals:
Don’t Limit Yourself to Promotion Goals. In other words, make goals to enrich yourself, no matter your position on the totem pole presently.
Focus on What You Are Most Passionate About. It’s no accident that the most successful people in the world are passionate about what they do. Because of their passion and interest in their career goals they will follow them to the ends of the earth.
Get Feedback from Loved Ones and Colleagues. Sometimes we are not even aware of our greatest strengths. Get a variety of counsel from people whose opinion you value.
Make Sure You Do Your Due Diligence. Don’t base your career goals on a job that looks sexy or fun without looking under the hood. It’s anawful exercise in waste to spend years developing your skills and abilities only to not like the job you end up in.
Remember That the You of Tomorrow is Not Going to Feel the Same as the You of Today. People change, often drastically, over the time it takes to build the capabilities to be truly successful in a line of work. This means avoid career goals that are fads, or the neatest thing going today.
1. SET YOUR CAREER GOALS.
This is the fun, no-holds barred part of having career goals, so let’s run with it. Let your imagination run loose. No barriers, no restrictions. What have you always wanted to do as a career? It doesn’t matter if it sounds silly to the pragmatist in you, allow your brain to go with it.
If you could have your pick of any job in the universe, what would it be? Perhaps this job doesn’t even exist or have a name yet.
This is your life, and you have every right to dream and choose precisely how you would like to achieve it.
Don’t limit yourself here, there will be plenty of time for reality later.
“I would like to be___________”
2. PLAN YOUR CAREER GOALS
Now we are going to take that dream and mould it into a workable goal. Here is where you are going to try and make your career goals more specific, and to give them a time-frame.
Before giving your goal a definitive time-frame, ask yourself what you career goals will require from you to be achieved. Think of all the resources you will require in terms of education, skills, abilities, the people you will need.
What is stopping you from achieving your career goals right now? List them all out.
Whether it’s work experience, connections, anything at all that you think is keeping you from your goals. Take this list and hold on to it, because in the next step we are going to create a plan to methodically destroy every single one of those impediments.
Now that you have this list of tasks, write out your career goals in the following format:
“I would like to be a _________ by ___________”
3. CREATE A PLAN OF ACTION
Now that you have a list of actions that need to be accomplished, it is time to put it all together in your own personal action plan. Inside this document you will create a road map for your career goals.
This plan will be a flexible document. As time passes and things change you should adapt your plan accordingly. Life is often unpredictable, and you should never throw your plan away simply because it throws you a curveball.
Adapt, adjust, and perservere.
4. FOLLOW THROUGH
Ultimately, this is where most people will stumble or outright fail. Many will have their beautiful goal plan and place it up on the shelf, waiting for the right day to put it to use. Others, intimidated or fearful of the work required will procrastinate, allowing their career goals to wither to dust.
Do not be this person. Act now, act tomorrow, and every day after that. As cliche as it is, there truly is nothing standing between you achieving your career goals besides yourself.
Alex Work is a personal performance specialist who focuses on helping people improve their goal setting and leadership skills. Want help with your own career goals? Check out YourGoalBook.com, the world’s most powerful goal setting weapon.
